Entertainment

An Art Class in a Video Game?

Educational video games typically try to disguise their educational components with story lines, characters and game play. Art Academy for Nintendo DS, which will launch October 25, takes the term to a new level by focusing more on the "educational" and less on the "game." Nintendo will be giving you straight-up art lessons.

The game has two components: a group of consecutive art lessons and a free draw tool. Vince, your friendly personal art instructor, leads you through 10 art lessons at your own pace. Throughout the lessons, you're asked to create a step-by-step drawing by applying the techniques you've learned. Nintendo DS has been used in education before and has even been integrated into Japanese classrooms, but it's never adopted this kind of course structure.

In the free draw portion of the game, you can either take a photo with the console to use as a model or choose from 50 gallery images. The image is displayed on the top screen so that you can reference it while composing your artwork on the lower screen. Art supplies are impressively realistic. You can choose different styles and widths of paint brushes, mix colors on a virtual palette, and can even dilute the paint on your brush with virtual water.

But can you really learn art from a video game? Though we were skeptical at first, it seems so. Vince's instructions, though at times requiring a bit more clickthrough than necessary, actually gave us some tips that improved our artwork. It was particularly helpful to watch Vince's demonstration brushstrokes on the virtual paper before attempting them. The Nintendo DS's touch screen, portability and pencil all create a quite realistic drawing pad.

While a Nintendo spokesman explained that the game isn't necessarily intended to replace valuable classroom instruction, it could.

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